This automatically turns Youtube video URLs (the complete ones, not the youtu.be short urls) into embedded videos. So if I’m going to share a Youtube video, rather than share it directly I’ll just paste it’s URL into a post and send people to watch it on my site. It supports a ton of other video sites too, not just Youtube.

This pulls an image from the video you’ve posted and adds it as a featured image. I’m not using these thumbnails in my actual site’s theme currently, they’re set to “display:none” in my CSS. But this is great for using an RSS reader that includes images like like Pulse News or Facebook’s RSS Graffiti app to syndicate your content to a facebook page or profile along with a video thumbnail.

Caveat: Without this little tweak the thumbnails will not make it into your RSS feed, which is kind of the whole idea.

What if you don’t want the same widgets on every single page? This is the way to add boolean logic to determine weather your widget will be displayed or not. Expressions are in PHP and can use any wordpress codex functions (mostly the ones starting with is_) . I use it like this…

This is a great way to add an image gallery with expanding lightbox that lets your user zoom into the images as they are clicked. There are also a host of related plugins for having a smooth Javascript-based slideshows. Example:

[nggallery id=1]

Caveat: You’ll still need to pre-process images to make them suitable for web, otherwise you’ll end up having people zoom into images that are many megabytes in size.

This is the best way I’ve found to send out tweets for my posts. I’ve set mine up to use my own URL shortener which uses YOURLS. If you don’t have your own url shorterner, you can also use services like bit.ly and is.gd.

This is the best social media sharing component I could find. I’ve tried some others like SexyBookmarks by Sharaholic, but I don’t like how it requires people to authenticate with OAuth just to send out a tweet.

Caveats: For twitter this bypasses the YOURLS short links, and instead use the t.co shortener, and for reddit, somehow it doesn’t automatically transfer the title of your post on your first share.

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